Top 10: Strongmen

Follow AskMen on Twitter. While the World’s Strongest Man competition is fun to watch, we cannot help but long for the classic strongmen in history. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, a strongman worked as part circus performer, part power-lifter and part wrestler. Actual strongman competitions existed, but they rarely had real structure. It usually boiled down to, “Hey, see that heavy thing? I can pick it up. Can you?” Or if you became well-known, you wrestled professionally when the sport resembled something between Greco-Roman and a bar fight.

They were quirky showmen with cocky attitudes. They lifted and broke things that no normal person should. If one strongman happened to roll into town when another one was there, they had to fight for the local audience. They wrestled all comers and afterward, they would drink everyone under the table. Here are the top 10 strongmen that we’d travel back in time just to watch.